Companion

Companion is the type of movie you want to go into as blind as possible. So, I'll do a very short, spoiler-free review up top followed by a full-spoiler review (after a warning) below.

Directed by Drew Hancock and produced by Zach Cregger, much ado has been made of the fact that Companion is "from the people who brought you Barbarian"...a marketing choice to entice people to attend a movie that promises to be full of twists and turns. And although there are many twists (some of them spoiled in the trailers), Companion is more of a dark comedy with horror elements than a wildly tense horror film (as Barbarian was). So for those of you who aren't crazy about horror, but enjoy thrillers, Companion is a safe movie to go see.

In a spoiler-free nutshell, Companion is about Josh (Jack Quaid) and Iris (Sophie Thatcher), a couple who are visiting Josh's friends at a huge lakehouse for a weekend of fun. Iris is insecure because she's met some of Josh's friends before and is convinced they don't like her. Josh brushes off Iris's concerns.

The friends at the lakehouse include aloof Kat (Megan Suri), her (married) boyfriend Sergey (Rupert Friend), who is also the owner of the lakehouse, Eli (Harvey Guillen), and his boyfriend Patrick (Lukas Gage). 

Things go awry. That's it. That's all I can say. I encourage you to go see it without reading anything else. There are some horror/thriller elements, as I mentioned above, but they aren't too gory or intense. Again, it's more of a dark comedy than anything else.

Grade: B+

***

AND NOW FOR THE SPOILERS!

So, people got pissed because the second trailer for Companion (and the poster!) give away the fact that Iris is a robot. A "companion" robot, to be specific. I knew this twist going in and I also knew that she was going to kill someone at some point. 

However, despite knowing the central twist, Companion was still filled with surprises. The fact that Iris is a robot is revealed about 20 minutes into the movie after she stabs Sergey in the neck with a switchblade when he attempts to assault her. Coming back to the lakehouse covered in blood, the rest of the friends freak the hell out while Iris tries to explain that she had to do it. Josh says "go to sleep, Iris" and she...powers down.

From there, we learn that this whole weekend was a setup between Josh and Kat to kill Sergey and steal from his secret safe which is filled with 12 million dollars cash (convenient!). Josh hacked Iris's system and turned her aggression levels way up and then put her in a situation where Sergey would attempt to rape her and she would fight back. All Kat and Josh need to do is turn her in to Empathix (the robot company), make up a BS excuse about how they have no idea what cause Iris to malfunction, take the money and run. Of course, things don't go as planned.

For one thing, Eli wasn't in on the plan and when he finds out what's going on, he demands a cut of the money for himself and a cut for Patrick. Josh and Kat protest, saying that Patrick doesn't deserve a cut...because he's also a robot! This is a twist that I did not see coming despite the fact that Eli and Patrick have a similar "meet cute" story to Iris and Josh (these meet cutes are programmed into the robot's memory to establish a "love link" between the robot and it's owner). Also, Patrick is a bit out of Eli's league. Still, I didn't see it coming.

Iris doesn't know she's a robot until Josh explains to her how they actually met. No, it wasn't a funny story about Josh causing a display of oranges to fall on the floor at a supermarket. In reality, Iris was brought to Josh's apartment and set to his specifications (and then they immediately fucked when Iris came online). Everything Iris knows about herself is just in her programming to make her seem more human. Hell, Josh can even increase and decrease her intelligence levels. An incel's wet dream.

Upon learning the truth, Iris is able to escape and grab Josh's phone, where she immediately goes to her own app and increases her intelligence to 100% (Josh had it set to 40% because he is The Worst). But Josh, Kat, Eli, and Patrick are on her tail, and they have a gun. They also have Patrick, who can be turned into a violent killing machine just as Iris was. Will a self-aware robot be able to outsmart humans? 

I'll stop there, but more twists and turns abound. Companion was a delightfully fun movie and although it doesn't have the weight of Get Out or The Stepford Wives, the toxic masculinity admittedly did hit a little harder given *gestures broadly*. Jack Quaid is excellent as Josh: a sweet, seemingly harmless man on the outside and a loathesome misogynist on the inside. To no one's surprise, he immediately betrays Kat, the only other woman in the movie, the minute she becomes an inconvenience to him.

Sophie Thatcher is also excellent and is entirely believable as a love doll: she is just so, so adorable, but with a deep, husky voice and a hint of shyness. Truly, any man would want her as an obedient little pet. But the minute her aggression and intelligence levels are turned up, she becomes a resourceful, courageous being. At first, she only wants to escape. But by the end, she wants revenge.

The rest of the cast is great. Harvey Guillen is hilarious as a pudgy nerd who, at the end of the day, is not much different from Josh. And Lukas Gage, similar to Thatcher, swivels from sweet puppy dog to mindless killer the minute his system is fucked with. I've been seeing Gage in more and more movies and TV shows and I'm really impressed with him. And of course Guillen, best known as Guillermo in What We Do in the Shadows, is always a delight.

I had such a fun time watching this movie. Sure, it's not going to win any awards or blow anyone's mind, but it's a fun and dark exploration of toxic masculinity in which the woman (well, robot woman) wins in the end. My only complaint is that Josh didn't suffer enough at the end.

Grade: B+